Each week during the season, we look at the big events and big games around Division I men’s college hockey in Tuesday Morning Quarterback.
DAN: A hearty welcome back to all of our faithful readers and college hockey fans, and a very Happy New Year to all of you. Especially you, Jim, I hope your holidays were full of rest and good cheer, and I’m hoping for the very best for you and all of our colleagues as we turn the corner to 2026… I still can’t believe that I’m quickly approaching my 20th anniversary of graduating college.
Anyways, that’s not why anyone’s here (though I hope we all agree that music and movies were way better in 2006 and 2007). As I’m sure everyone is aware, the annual semester break gave us an opportunity to send college hockey’s best onto the international stage. This year, that’s meant that NCAA talent is competing at the World Juniors and the annual Spengler Cup in Switzerland.
I readily admit that I didn’t quite understand the Spengler Cup until I started watching this year’s event. I knew it was a big deal, especially in Canada, but sending the U.S. Collegiate Selects to the program opened a door that hadn’t opened for me. And yet here on Monday, writing this up with breath held about a possible tournament win.
United States college players took to the ice and straight out beat international professionals. Were you surprised with that outcome, and are you hoping that this is the start of a flourishing relationship between the NCAA and the European circuit?
JIM: I have to say that the outcome thus far at the Spengler Cup is pleasantly surprising. Listen, I’m not shocked that some of the best college players were able to go to Switzerland and be competitive in a tournament that features ex-NHL players. The pleasant surprise comes more from the actual execution on the part of the team.
It would have been very easy for the Collegiate Selects team to go to the Spengler Cup and put forth a respectable effort and leave happy and content. But this team went beyond that, taking a Canada team backstopped by former NHLer James Reimer to the brink in the opener before falling 3-2, and then the very next day beat HC Davos the top team in the Swiss Elite League. That was enough to win the group and give the Collegiate Selects a bye into the semifinals where they will take on HC Sparta on Tuesday morning.
In conversations with Steve Metcalf, the Hockey East commissioner who was the major visionary behind having this U.S. Selects team participate in the tournament, he expressed the concern from tournament organizers that a college all-star team wouldn’t be competitive against professional players. We’ve already seen that simply isn’t true.
Which brings me to the other major international stage this week, the IIHF World Under-20 Championship, better known as World Juniors. The Americans are not just the two-time defending champions but they’re also the host in the Twin Cities this year. Thus far, the U.S. has defeated Germany, Switzerland and just last night, Slovakia.
This is certainly a solid team top to bottom, but this roster seems to maybe be missing something that the last two teams have had. The results to this point don’t show too many deficiencies, but I’m not sure that a week from today’s we’ll be talking about a third-straight gold medal for the U.S. Call me a naysayer, but my gut feeling on this team isn’t as strong as the last two. Am I alone on an island with that take?
DAN: You’re not, but I think everything requires a bit of context, right?
Last year’s team had seven different holdovers from the 2024 team that won USA’s first gold medal in three years, and the vast majority of those repeat champions finished their season in the NHL after earning first round draft picks. We essentially knew that the bulk of those players were blue chip prospects, and the likes of Zeev Buium, Ryan Leonard, Drew Fortescue, and Trey Augustine were expected to perform at a higher level than previous iterations.
That’s just a main fact. The first six picks of last year’s NHL Draft were either Canadian or Swedish, and Porter Martone deals with a decided lack of publicity at the world juniors because he’s skating with the Canadian team. It’s hard for me to truly measure college players who aren’t American because we’re inherently wired to think about the World Junior roster as “NCAA vs. CHL” instead of “USA vs. Canada,” so that’s a wrinkle that I’ve needed to work through.
None of that, of course, means that the Americans are at a disadvantage, and maybe this year’s team is gelling significantly better because it’s not relying on pure skill and ability. Plus there’s the home ice advantage of skating in front of 15,000 star spangled Minnesotans. We won’t truly know until we know, I guess.
Onto a separate topic that’s tangentially related to the World Junior. Jim, we always talk about the teams that are most heavily impacted by losing players to the international stage. This year, it felt like Boston College was at the biggest disadvantage. The Eagles needed to come away from the Kwik Trip Holiday Classic with wins, but a loss to Western Michigan relegated BC into the consolation game against Lake Superior State. I know how much people hate what-if scenarios, but walk me through if you think things would’ve been different for BC with Hagens, Teddy Stiga, and head coach Greg Brown on the bench in Milwaukee…and if you think this week’s games could come back to haunt the highly-touted team in Chestnut Hill.
And yes, there’s a roster addition worth talking about there…but we’ll get to that in a minute.
JIM: I think there is an inherent difficulty for teams with high-end talent knowing the would typically lose the youngest of those players this time of the season. So with the addition of the Spengler Cup – and please don’t read this as negative commentary about the Spengler Cup, it is not – but a second international all-star team means more players missing this week.
There have been two schools of thought to how you approach this. One is that you’re fortunate to get these players so losing them for a game or two at this time of year is the price of doing business. But in recent years, more coaches have extended their team’s break to remind idle between Christmas and the first week of January. Given that World Juniors ends on January 6, it is difficult to take two weekends off to start the second half but Boston College took that approach the last two seasons. Penn State sort of went that route this year but they’ll be without their World Junior players against RIT this weekend despite having not played a game since November 22.
That’s right. Three major holidays will have passed without the Nittany Lions lacing them up.
That, to me, just feels like too much time off. So I guess therein lies the rub: either you let extra rust build or you play some key games without your best players.
It’s a tough choice that I’m glad I never will have to make.
DAN: This doesn’t lead me directly back to my earlier point, but I suppose it’s a good time to at least mention the roster changes that took place over the semester break.
The biggest news more naturally emanated from BC’s addition of Oscar Hemming, a presumptive first round draft pick who ran into junior hockey eligibility issues when his Swedish league challenged and disputed his transfer to the CHL. Having originally planned on playing in the BCHL, he’s now a member of an NCAA program after the IIHF threatened further sanctions. He was on the ice for both of BC’s games in Milwaukee, and he registered his first two assists with a plus-3 rating in the 4-3 win over Lake Superior State.
His story is far from the only midyear roster news story, though. Echoing the headlines created by Boston University’s addition of Mikhail Yegorov from last season, there have been a number of comings and goings that now command our attention. Colorado College, for example, added former AHL defenseman Mats Lindgren to its roster while Miami lost the services of goaltender Shika Gadzhiev after eligibility issues prevented him from ever playing in a game. The RedHawks responded by adding Mathias Langevin, a QMJHL product from Rimouski. St. Cloud defenseman Kaleb Tiessen, meanwhile, announced he was leaving to sign with the ECHL after playing 22 games across three seasons because he wanted to play more immediate games.
Midseason movement seems like a novel concept. I know I’m not familiar with it at all, so walk me through some background and if this is something that’s part of a new world – and if we all have to get more used to it occurring ahead of the second-half stretch run.
JIM: I think this is part of the new world of college hockey recruiting. That is what has always made college hockey unique – or college sports in general. You don’t typically add a player to a college roster mid season because of the need to sync with the institution’s academic schedule. But for that same reason you don’t typically have players leave your team midseason.
But this year I am not surprised to see players leaving in higher numbers than year’s past. So many players made the decision to even attend college this season late in the recruiting season. Thus, I’m not surprised to see some regretting their decision and wanting to leave.
But with those numbers increasing and many universities making it easier to add players at break, we’re definitely seeing this more this season.
We will have to watch this trend in future season particularly as schools that opted in to the House v. NCAA class action settlement, whether rules will allow for midseason additions in the future. That could be its own column, but let’s just say all issues related to recruiting is always changing. And that’s makes the job of every college hockey coach more difficult.